Protecting the environment - by those who do not think that doing so is important - is often depicted as a luxury that poor countries (and even wealthy ones) cannot afford. This is arguably not true: There are far greater costs in the long term for not protecting the environment than there are short-term costs in economic policies that destroy the world around us. However, each year economic and fiscal policies are put into place that exact significant environmental costs simply because they provide short-term gains - usually for a large corporation. This paper examines how a number of economic policies tend to encourage exploitation of increasingly diminishing natural resources. Many of these policies (indeed probably most) fall under the rubric of globalization.
As Kegley and Wittcoff (2000) note, the focus of the effects of globalization tends to shift with the speaker's or writer's own sphere of interest. Within the arena of economics, globalization tends to refer to two different types of activities. The first of these is the ever-increasing concentration of capital in financial markets that has come about through the increasing amalgamation of firms as they acquire divisions in a variety of countries. The second and related economic aspect of globalization is seen in the ever-increasing tendency of countries to affiliate themselves into multi-national economic blocs such as the European Community and the tri-country state defined by NAFTA.
Such economic mergers and alliances are of course not something unique to the turn of this century - one can assume that trade agreements (which are both political and business arrangements after all) have been at the heart of human interpersonal relations for centuries. What marks them as being fundamentally different now - what defines them as a form of globalization rather than merely old-fashioned business-as-usual is the degree to which such cross-national alliances occur, as Munch (...